Infowars founder Alex Jones is asking the court for a new trial after a Connecticut jury determined he should pay $965 million to eight families and one responder in compensatory damages for his repeated false claims that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was staged.
Jones’ lawyers, Norman Pattis and Kevin Smith, argued in a court motion filed Friday that “the amount of the compensatory damages award exceeds any rational relationship to the evidence.” The lawyers also argued that the verdict was tainted by pre-trial motions and “evidentiary rulings” which prevented Jones from receiving a fair trial.
In September, a Connecticut judge ruled that Jones was liable for defamation by default after he refused to cooperate with the court, with the jury trial being conducted to determine how much compensation was owed to the plaintiffs. During the trial, the parents of several of the children killed in the shooting testified to the harassment they have received since Jones’ claims that the shooting was a hoax grew into a far-right conspiracy theory that persisted even after Jones admitted he was lying.
Jones’ legal team is contesting that initial default ruling, arguing that Jones had indeed cooperated with the court by providing thousands of pages of documents and attending multiple depositions.
“The result was the functional equivalent of an execution by firing squad, with the defendants required to pay the cost of the bullets used to kill them,” they wrote. “Mr. Jones is within his rights to regard this trial as little more than very sort of hoax he was accused of spreading.”